Interactions between citizen science and the ecosystem around Wikipedia

This repo hosts a contribution to the 2022 conference of the European Citizen Science Association taking place on 6-8 October in Berlin. It was presented on 7 October.

The PDF is also available on Wikimedia Commons, with some background available on the English Wikipedia. All images are linked to their openly licensed source.

The video included here failed to record the screen (so it has only audio), but a fully functional one is available via https://youtu.be/-yYzATI9U6M .

Abstract

Wikipedia formed the nucleus of the Wikimedia ecosystem of open knowledge websites. This session will provide an introduction to the citizen science aspects of this ecosystem.

Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org) is a multilingual collaborative platform that democratizes data curation similar to how Wikipedia democratized the curation of encyclopedic information. It is tightly integrated with all language versions of Wikipedia and its sister sites, and it collects, reuses and provides structured public domain data across all areas of knowledge from all around the world. Wikidata meets the requirements of the FAIR principles to make data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable, and it allows people to collaborate who do not share a common language. With about 25,000 volunteer contributors each month that collaborate openly, Wikidata blends open science and citizen science approaches.

The human contributors are aided by hundreds of automated or semi-automated tools that perform repetitive tasks at scale, based on community-agreed standards. Together, they have aggregated over 13 billion RDF triples on the platform that can be queried via a dedicated SPARQL endpoint and other means, which aids in quality control of the database content and workflows, and facilitates knowledge discovery within the corpus.

Thanks to a combination of extensive examples, help pages, tutorials, user interface design and other mechanisms, this endpoint is gentle to users across various skill levels for the SPARQL query language. This way, Wikidata also democratizes access to and participation in the Semantic Web.

The software underlying Wikidata is Wikibase (http://wikiba.se/). It is open source and openly licensed, which allows anyone to run semantic databases that are interoperable with Wikidata and other Wikibase instances. By default, Wikibase instances come with a SPARQL endpoint of their own that is modelled after the Wikidata one.

Besides Wikidata and Wikibase, there are multiple layers of citizen science activities taking place in other Wikimedia projects, e.g. the identification of species, historic personalities or buildings as well as the transcriptions of documents or the location of historic maps.